Q: Time Machine solution

Entirely agree, and all users should be made aware (though most still seem to be lightheartedly oblivious). Ever since I lost all my data the second time (!) decades ago, I’ve been belt-and-suspenders: regular SuperDuper clones + TM (+ TechTool Pro + DiskWarrior (until it died)).

From what I understand, the cause is defective Seagate drives.

I back up to a local clone (Carbon Copy Cloner), a local Time Machine, a NAS Synology-based Time Machine, and Backblaze.

I find the Synology to be slightly less dependable than the local Time Machine, but neither is bullet-proof. Both eventually require a full reset. Given my druthers, I’ll full restore from the local clone before going after any of the Time Machines.

Arq is good and is easy to use. There is one issue I have hit a number of times ( no fault of Arq) and that is when a drive is disconnected and not properly unmounted.

This is for local or network volumes.

When the OS remounts the drive it adds a new symlink in the /Volumes directory, adding a -1 to the name. Arq (as you might expect) doesn’t recognise that and your backups fail until you fix the issue manually.

I quite like Arq and just put up with this.

r

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The good feature of TM is that it can automatically backup to several drives, alternating between available drives.
For example I use 3 TM drives for a Macbook. One is an external drive on an iMac and the TM on the Macbook automatically connects to it whenever connected to my home wifi (i.e. no need to mount that drive via Finder). The others are SSD drives that I regularly connect directly to the Macbook.
A proviso is that I am running Mojave. Maybe TM under Big Sur is not as versatile?
I used to use Time Capsules connected by ethernet cable but their wifi became unreliable. I haven’t experienced hard disk faults with them and still use one for secondary storage (eg media files) but not Time Machine. They were a brilliant concept for home networking and it was disappointing when Apple abandoned them.

Yeah, I have a good OWC drive plugged into my Synology’s USB 3 port, and it works…as long as you only want a few days’ backup, because it seems to lose its mind every week or two. I just looked, and although I haven’t seen any errors, I see only two days of backups. I have no idea what happens; the RT-2600ac doesn’t tell me, and neither does Time Machine. Oh, and I have TM Editor on each of three machines set so that TM only runs once, at night while things are quiet, at different times on each machine. Definitely not reliable.

I wonder if it could be the drive.

Last month, I shared an anecdote about an external hard drive flaking out on a regular basis, and the cause appeared to be from overheating. Once I replaced the drive’s enclosure with one that has a fan, all the problems went away. It’s now been almost 2 months and the drive has been rock-solid, compared with randomly disconnecting 1-2 times per week when I was using the original (non-cooled) enclosure.

I’ve given upon network Time Machine backups…they fail randomly, one destination works and another setup identically doesn’t, one laptop works and one doesn’t. I switched to aCarbonCopyCloner job to a share instead of TM to a .dmg file…this works as it should. Numerous other cloning or sync software should also work depending on what you have a license for.

Yeah, I find that Time Machine is only as good as the connection to the disk.

My Synology back goes from an ethernet connection on my iMac to a LAN port on an Orbi Wifi 6 Satellite through Wifi 6 backhaul to a Wifi 6 main router in the family room then over ethernet to the Synology.

Synology share is set up with checksumming on, a quota 1.5-2x the hard disk size, share in the time machine list, and a SMB protocol connection. It will work (like the local time machine which lives in a ventilated OWC Thunderbay 4 enclosure as a JBOD disk) for months at a time, but will eventually succumb to some quirk in macOS processing and the Time Machine will need to be reformatted if a local disk or the share deleted and redefined if on the Synology.

I considered a NAS/Time Machine setup a while back, but I never really trusted TM because, at least in the early days, it seemed like a black box. The I figured Retrospect would do pretty well, and though I haven’t looked at it in years, that’s the next possibility for me. In the mean time, I use CCC locally to two 3T drives, and succumbed to Code42’s CrashPlan for Small Business wiles. Yes, I was unhappy when they eliminated the home version and jacked up the price, but they keep previous versions of files, which was the dealbreaker for me with Backblaze. Plus, their tech support has been outstanding. Whatever I (and you) do locally, reliable backups offsite are a must.

If you really want to go the local network/NAS route, Retrospect might be a good solution (full disclosure, I used to work at Dantz last century), but again, I haven’t looked at it in a long time. Love to know how well it’s working these days.

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Just looked again, and again it has only this morning’s backup. No error message that I can find, but it apparently eats its own spawn. Weird, and very disheartening.

Dear all,

As I read your posts (for which I’m grateful) I’m coming to the realization that a reliable TM-like solution (files sequentially going way back, over WiFi) no longer exists (and Apple’s was never that reliable, either, just better than not having it), period. I’m away from home for a while, but when I get back I’ll try the suggestions, look more closely at what SuperDuper or CCC can accomplish, and fool around with the hardware I now own; I’m unwilling to buy new stuff unless I’m pretty sure it’ll work as planned. Sic transit … C’est la vie … bite the bullet :cry:

Under Big Sur, I back up my M1 MBA to two volumes. One is a Time Capsule continuously connected by ethernet (well, when the MBA is in my study) and the other is an external drive intermittently turned on and connected by USB.

Absolutely on the random—the iMac has never had a problem, but from 2015 to 2020, the MacBook averaged about eight months before Time Capsule said it was time to start afresh. I regret having purchased the Time Capsule.

I would repurpose it as a pseudo-NAS, but I would forget to back it up, and I don’t need nearly that much space.

I finally gave up on network backups. I kept having those backups fail when needed them most. I now attach a separate 1 TB SSD to each Mac, and I have had no problems since I did this over a year ago.

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@Robert - While I haven’t given up altogether, that’s probably the only reliable method left today, and probably what I’ll end up using. In the end, I’m extremely disappointed with Apple for having discontinued, rather than improved, their novel and very useful capability. First, most users today have a home network. Second, there’s almost daily news lately of hacker-compromised systems, clouds and ISPs, and that seems to guarantee increasing insecurity of data in the future.

We had this discussion in another thread a few years ago, and I shared a possible approach to using Time Machine across a network that works around the problem of it not having a client/server architecture.

@jkalogeras, nice to see you here! It’s been ages since Dantz. I’m hoping to look at Retrospect 18 again soon.

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CarbonCopyCloner has been 100% bulletproof since I ditched networked TM backups for me…create a share on the remote Mac…launch CCC and select Remote Macintosh as the destination. I’ve had them going that way for 6 months or so and they just work…even if the laptop is asleep when it’s time.

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Thanks Adam! Yes, it’s been ages – I’m not even sure who I know at Retrospect anymore, but I’ll find out if I ever get the NAS backup off the ground. Looking forward to seeing what you think of Retrospect 18.

I’d be very interested to hear your results.

I am interested in Retrospect. I used it years ago and read recently that they have a way to backup offsite with a time lock feature to prevent ransomware.

Yeah, that’s discussed here and is what caught my interest as well.